Domain Principal - Customer Voice and Experience

• Lead customer-led service improvement across Inland Revenue's digital services
• Permanent opportunity
• Turn deep customer understanding into measurable improvements for customers and the tax system

The Opportunity | Ara Whiwhi Mahi

Inland Revenue's digital services play a critical role in how New Zealanders meet their tax and social policy obligations. myIR and Gateway Services support high-volume interactions with individuals, families, businesses and the software providers that help them manage their obligations.

Inland Revenue has been effective in digitising the tax system and enabling customers to manage their obligations through digital self-service. We believe the next opportunity is to build a deeper understanding of our customers, their real-life and business experiences, and the factors that influence how confidently and accurately they meet their obligations.

We are looking for an experienced customer research and service design leader to lead how we develop and apply this understanding. You will establish a structured approach to identifying the customer and service problems where focused research and design can create the greatest value and translate customer insight into practical recommendations for change.

Working with Customer Experience Designers, digital and operational specialists, analysts, delivery teams and senior leaders, you will help shape improvements across customer journeys, business processes and digital services. Your focus will be on changes that make a material and measurable difference-reducing unnecessary customer effort and demand for assistance, improving service performance, and making tax simpler and increasingly able to happen as part of customers' everyday lives and business activities.

This role may be based anywhere in New Zealand where IR has an office.

In this role, you will:

• Lead customer-led service improvement: You will establish a structured practice that identifies and prioritises significant customer and service problems and builds a deep understanding of customers' real-life and business experiences, behaviours and needs.
• Turn customer understanding into material service improvement: You will translate this understanding into clear problem definitions, design direction and decision-ready recommendations for change across customer journeys, business processes and digital services. You will influence improvements that make a material and measurable difference to customer effort, demand for assistance, service performance and customers' ability to meet their obligations confidently and accurately.
• Balance customer and organisational needs: You will integrate customer insight with organisational objectives, regulatory settings, operational knowledge, service performance and technology constraints. You will advocate for changes that improve the customer experience while remaining practical, sustainable and capable of delivering value.
• Influence end-to-end service design: You will work across organisational and service boundaries to address the wider causes of customer difficulty. You will influence how policy, process, operations, communications and digital services work together, recognising that effective customer outcomes may extend beyond the digital experience.
• Demonstrate measurable outcomes: You will ensure customer research and design interventions begin with a clear view of the problem, expected value and measures of success. You will evaluate whether resulting changes reduce customer effort, avoidable contact or service failure and improve confident, accurate compliance or other agreed outcomes.
• Provide authoritative advice: You will advise specialists, delivery teams, governance groups and senior leaders on customer experience and service design, communicating the evidence, implications, limitations and trade-offs clearly.

About you | Mou

We are looking for someone who can build deep customer understanding, apply broader systems thinking and turn insight into service improvements that deliver measurable value at scale.

You will bring:

• Experience establishing, leading or materially evolving a customer-led service improvement, human-centred design or customer research practice.
• Demonstrated ability to turn customer insight into changes to services, processes or systems that delivered material and measurable outcomes.
• Experience identifying and prioritising customer and service problems based on their scale, impact and potential value, and planning programmes of research and design activity to address them.
• Strong systems thinking and design judgement, with the ability to bring together customer, regulatory, operational, organisational and technology considerations to shape practical service improvements.
• Experience leading specialist work through clear commissioning, quality expectations, constructive challenge and ongoing stewardship.
• Strong relationship-management and communication capability, with the confidence to advocate for customers while helping stakeholders work through competing needs and practical constraints.
• Motivation to improve public services that affect people and businesses across Aotearoa New Zealand.

You may have developed this experience through service design, strategy design, customer research, human-centred design, behavioural research, customer experience, service transformation or the improvement of complex public or regulated services.

You do not need to have worked in tax before, but you will need to be comfortable working in a large and complex environment where customer needs, regulatory obligations, operational delivery and technology are closely connected.

If this sounds like the kind of customer and service leadership challenge you want to contribute to, we're keen to hear from you.

Apply here | Tono mai

Please apply online with your CV and supporting information, clearly outlining your experience against the requirements for this role.

For more information about the role please contact [email protected]

We recognise that AI tools can support application preparation. Just make sure your responses reflect your own experience-we're keen to get to know the real you and what you can bring to the role.

Like you, we pride ourselves on our friendly and informative communication. If you need accessibility assistance at any point in the application process or would like to know more about what accessibility and inclusion means to us, please call 0800 775 247 to leave a message and a member of the team will be in touch.

Applications close 1.00pm, Tuesday 11 August 2026